How in the world could you possibly look inside a star? You could break out the scalpels and other tools of the surgical trade, but good luck getting within a few million kilometers of the surface before your skin melts off. The stars of our universe hide their secrets very well, but astronomers can outmatch…

Tech giants are generally slow when it comes to making their products accessible to the differently abled. But lately, some of them have been working on innovative projects that will accommodate more users. One of the most interesting of these comes from Chinese tech conglomerate Alibaba, which introduced a smart display technology to help the…

The future of sex work, despite what you may have heard from frantic journalists decrying the death of human interaction, is not robots. It’s humans. But those humans, and their clients, will rely on AI for their safety. Well, the lucky ones will. It’s difficult to put the global plight of sex workers in perspective.…

Don’t adjust your TV set, that’s just a new computer-generated news anchor working out the bugs. Xinhua, a Chinese state-run media company, and Sogou, a Beijing-based search engine debuted a pair of AI news anchors this week at the World Internet Conference. While identical in appearance, the two versions are designed to appease both English and…

The US Air Force has a penchant for developing officers, but the ‘general’ it’s working on right now doesn’t have any stars on its uniform: it’s general artificial intelligence (GAI). The term GAI refers to an artificial intelligence with human-level or better cognition. Basically, when people argue that today’s AI isn’t “real AI,” they’re…

A team of scientists from the University of Southern California (USC) are taking on a decades-old mystery concerning the human brain and how it processes utterances that aren’t linguistic in nature. You may know this phenomenon as beatboxing. The legends surrounding the birth of hip hop invariably begin in New York City with DJs cutting…

The problem with healthcare is simple: there’s not enough of it. In a perfect world we’d all have our own personal physicians like the Queen. But in reality, the average doctor sees thousands of patients a year. Solving this problem could take decades. Unless, of course, someone were to “hack” the system itself using artificial…

Calling the EU’s new border control AI a “lie detector” is like calling Brexit a minor disagreement among friends. The low-down is that the EU is testing a pilot program for international airports featuring a machine learning-based “lie detector.” CNN broke the story last week in its article “Passengers to face AI lie detector tests…

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) recently conducted a big data study to determine whether social media ties play a role in people’s decision whether to evacuate affected areas during a hurricane. And, according to the research, those with the most “social capital” were more likely to heed official warnings and flee. Who knew social media could incite…

The ethical and social implications of Artificial Intelligence remain uncertain. Visual: Glen Carrie / Unsplash Artificial intelligence, or AI, is proliferating throughout society — promising advances in healthcare and science, powering search engines and shopping platforms, driving driverless cars, and assisting in hiring decisions. With such ubiquity comes power and influence. And along with the…